Book Review: Build

Make Things Worth Making (A Long Review)

Book Title:

Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Make Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell

I bought Build almost as soon as it was released. I know of Tony Fadell, but only remotely.  But the folk who was wholly involved in the production of the iPod, iPhone, and Nest. Indeed, whomever Tony was, he must have a long story to tell. There goes the Amazon 1-Click.

And, of course, nobody comes out of the blue and starts popping up great products like the iPod and the iPhone without the requisite experience. To quote Charly Munger, the world is not yet a crazy enough place to reward a whole bunch of undeserving people.

Build is a part memoir, part start-up book. You can read about Tony’s impressive career here, and I will briefly go over my main takeaways from the book in this blog.   

I once read a while back that one of the hallmarks of a good book is its impregnability to summarization. If such proclamation holds, which it does, my summary will be incomplete.

What should I do?

“The best way to find a job you’ll love and a career that will eventually make you successful is to follow what you’re naturally interested in, then take risks when choosing where to work.”

This sounds straightforward enough, but not really when you are in the driver’s seat. There are a couple of models for identifying fulfilling careers. Cal Newport seems to have a competing model in his book ‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You,’ where he argues that passion comes after you have already put in the hard work to become valuable. Afterward, Cal argues it will follow that you will find your career fulfilling.

Tony didn’t spend any time discussing his philosophy in-depth; however, I find Tony’s model much more intuitive because there is just a natural way interests drive the hard work needed to garner the right skillsets to eventually make a career fulfilling. But there is something to be said for Cal’s model: sometimes you will know what you are interested in until after trying it and putting in some decent work.

And then the risk part. Here is another quote from the book: “The only failure in your twenties is inaction. The rest is trial and error.”

Most people would agree with this. Life gets busier (and more challenging) as you grow older, primarily because of more responsibility and, at some point, lesser energy as you grow older.

But a complementary and much broader point here is that one should choose an impactful and challenging goal to reach such that even if you fail, you can hardly call it a failure.

Where should I work?

“You could go to Google, Apple, Facebook, or some other giant company, but it’ll be hard to maneuver yourself to work closely with the rock stars. And you should know you’re not going to make a real impact. Not for a long time. You’re a pebble bouncing off an elephant. But you’ll be a well-paid pebble-eating free kale chips, so if you do go that route enjoy the paycheck while working on your tiny piece of some vast and endless project. Then spend your ample free time getting a feel for the structures and divisions, the micro-disciplines, the processes, the research, the long-term projects, and the long-term thinking a company can do when shipping tomorrow isn’t critical to its survival. That stuff is good to know.”

First, he advises finding a business/field on the verge of (or starting) a revolution: a novel, emerging field so you can ride the tide of the wave. And then you work with your heroes in the field, preferably in a small company with “30-100” people, which will give you a great deal of contact with people you really want to learn from. And hopefully, that will get you started in building a career.

Managing teams.

Once you have picked up things that will allow you to thrive in your career, you can stay on as an independent contributor, or you could become a manager. If you want to become a manager, there are six things he advises you to know.

One, if you are doing it solely for money and prestige, there are other alternatives that promise a similar paycheck. Two, being a manager means stopping what made you successful; now, there will be more meetings, hiring, mentoring, and the like.

Three, management has to be learned. It is not a talent. Four, your number 1 job is that your team produces high-quality stuff. Five, telling your team the truth at all times is more important than your leadership style. Six, train at least a person on your team that will replace you. You shouldn’t worry about being outshined.  

How to make decisions

There are two kinds of decisions. Opinion-driven and data-driven decisions. Knowing the difference and when to use them is the key to good decision-making. An opinion-driven decision is a decision ultimately impervious to facts on the ground and numbers aggregation – you just have to follow your guts. As opposed to a data-driven decision. However, properly viewed, a lot of decisions are driven by both kinds, but with a predominant class. Again, knowing the difference is critical. I really loved this simple model. It qualifies as a first principle of decision-making.   

What is your product?

“Your product isn’t only your product. It is the whole user experience.”

There is something called brand, and it does have a meaning. Your brand is your product, and your product is the entire customer journey and touchpoints. 

Tony strongly advises that you draw pictures, make models, and think it through in detail. A customer sees your ad on YouTube, say, so what happens next? Every touch point has to be mapped entirely, even after buying your products, everything in detail.

Use analogies

Tony said one of the things he learned from Steve Jobs is that analogies give customers superpowers. In 2001, in a small press conference, Steve used the analogy “1,000 songs in your pocket” to describe the iPod.

This immediately gives the customer a contrastive framework with the status quo, i.e., CDs and tapes, that will only let you do one album at a time with ~ ten songs. What a significant improvement!

I still remember the first time I used an iPod; it was far away in southwestern Nigeria. It felt like magic. It was so small. So many songs, and it sounds so well. If I could afford one then, I would have bought it the next minute.

Almost two decades later, even while the product has been discontinued, I still have one.

On deadlines.

“You need constraints to make good decisions and the best constraint in the world is time. When you’re handcuffed to a hard deadline, you can’t keep trying this and that, changing your mind, putting the finishing touches on something that will never be finished. When you handcuff yourself to a deadline—ideally an external, immovable date like Christmas or a big conference—you have to execute and get creative to finish on time. The external heartbeat, the constraint, drives the creativity, which fuels the innovation.”

When I was in grad school, I tracked the time I spent working on my Ph.D. projects every day. When I analyze my data each year, something is always difficult to ignore – a spike in focus time close to the summer conferences. While conferences have its many benefits. An added benefit for me and so many grad students is that it allowed us to make good decisions and finish our projects. 

Profitable business

There are three, hopefully, progressive stages in profitability. With the first version of your product, you are still trying to find your fit, finetuning your products, and shipping out prototypes.  This is the stage where you outsource many things because your team is still small. Essentially, this is the stage where you have achieved some level of product market fit. Your customers at this stage will be the early adopters and innovators, folks who are okay with a few things being buggy. At this time, you are not profitable.

The next stage is when you have your “V2” ready. This product is adopted by the ‘early majority.’ In addition, you should have a profitable product, i.e., making a gross profit on each product sold. Some of the operations being outsourced are now being brought in-house.

You should have a refined product at the last stage, where your customers are mainly the ‘late majority and laggards.’ The main expertise for your operation is in-house at this point, and you should have (or aim for) a profitable business.   

“Until you optimize the business, not just the product, you can never build something lasting.”

In summary, you create a V1 product, scale it for V2, and then optimize the business in V3.

Spotting great ideas.

“The best ideas are painkillers, not vitamins.”

If you can, you want to build what people need. Badly.

Building et al

“Fifty percent of marriages fail, but 80 percent of startups do.”

The latter part of Build discusses Tony's advice on starting companies: you want to get quality experience by working in a startup first, and later in a big company. You need great mentors. Find a complementary cofounder, and build a founding team starting with seed crystals: folks who can bring extraordinary talents to your company.

His advice on cofounders:

“But be careful—even if you have a cofounder, there can only be one CEO. And if you pile on the cofounders, you’re asking for trouble. Having two founders works well. Three can work sometimes. I’ve never seen it work with more.”

On a founding team:

“When you close your eyes, you should already know exactly who your first employees will be. You should be able to write down a list of five names without a second thought. If you don’t have that list of names ready before you start, you probably shouldn’t be starting.”

On VC:

“Remember, once you take money from an investor, you’re stuck with them. And the balance of power shifts. A VC can fire a founder, but a founder can’t fire their VC. You can’t divorce them for irreconcilable differences… Typically, a VC needs between 18 and 22 percent to make their model work—step carefully if they begin asking for more. And don’t assume they’re the only game in town—if your gut is telling you to keep looking, then keep looking.”

Speaking of VCs, there is another excellent book I read on venture capital about a year ago: (Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It by Scott Kupor. It’s really good)

Coda

Build is a book that guides the reader from starting out, deciding on what to do, to starting your company, raising money, building companies, selling your companies, and everything in between. The breadth of the domain covered is impressive. The insights are gold, for anyone who wants to build anything in our world today. I certainly enjoyed reading it.

“In the end, there are two things that matter: products and people. What you build and who you build it with.”